It is unlikely that anyone would be so rude. On the other hand, my first advisor in grad school was an atheist. He died suddenly, and all his students went to a memorial. Someone decided it was necessary to include a minister speaking - who was more or less reduced to saying “Don didn’t hold with anything I’m about to say, but we’ll pray anyway.” Theists have these fantasies about big, bad atheists disrupting funerals and killing Christmas. In reality atheist get shat on by theists all the time.
You are right, atheists and other theist would never do that to a theist funeral. But to an atheist ceremony …
In the movie of Jules Feiffer’s “Little Murders” the Elliot Gould character instructs Donald Sutherland’s minister to have the ceremony with no mention of God. His new father-in-law bribes the minister to put it in anyway.
I started posting a reply here and then realised that it was pretty far off topic so I started a new thread here:
It’s about my major beef with the atheist character of the board, and a possibly pretty neat way of getting around it and making me happy. It might also make atheists happy, as it more or less involves putting religion in the category of fiction. Which I don’t think it is, by the way. But there’s no way I’m going to argue it now. Try in 50 years, when I’m wise. I can never be smart, according to the prevailing definition round here , so I’m going to try for wise instead!
My Dad was a Catholic who converted to Protestantism in his later years. When he passed the minister of the small local congregation was asked to speak. I suspected he couldn’t resist using my Dad’s funeral as a chance to proselytize and I was right. He had known my Dad for 4 or 5 years and the people there who had known him a lifetime needed something else.
See upthread. Don’t tell me factual information that is based on nothing but a fantasy. If someone tells me I’m going to hell, that’s a factual thing they are stating. They deserve to understand that they have no basis to make that call.
I’d correct someone if they told me I had to put chains on my tires in the summer too.
Yeah, that is the intellectual answer. But it isn’t always that easy because in effect that person is saying you are a “bad person” - despite the fact that they may know nothing about you other than that you do not profess to join in their particular self delusion. And IME they are happy to share that judgment with other members of your community, to the social detriment of your entire family.
At my grandmother’s funeral this past winter, it quickly became obvious to me that the preacher himself didn’t believe a word of what he was saying (when we met at the reception afterwards he refused to look me in the eye). But, instead of jumping up in the middle of the service and confronting him, I quietly pointed it out to my mother later that night. [So, yeah.]
It is a discussion board after all but I think I get your point. I often remind myself that not everyone comes here for the same reasons I do. If you want to get trough to someone because you suspect you might be able to actually fight ignorence then a softer approach is probable helpful. If you derive a certain satisfaction and entertainment from some sarcasm and mocking that’s another. If you just want to be as blunt as possible that’s another etc. All are part of what goes on here and it’s all okay.
And when you spot a Doper calling someone on their religious bullshit in such an environment, you’ll have a point. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand, does it? This forum is precisely the place to call someone on bullshit-if you don’t think it is appropriate to do it here, where the hell do you think it should be done?
Possibly, but I don’t care to be lumped in with them any more than someone who identifies as an atheist does. And because its so easy to rant about creationists and Phelps, religious debates on this board involve a lot of atheists patting themselves on the back for their superior grasp of intellectual topics, insulting theists for believing in “Jesus Horses” and bemoaning the horrors the Catholic Church has been responsible for over the millennium while any theist that dares stick their nose in is ridiculed as irrational - no matter how “soft” their theism is.
Its kind of hard to answer this without answering ‘why are people atheists’ and also what variations are there within atheism.
Clearly there are emotive/non-rational aspects that are involved with why people choose particular kinds of atheism and in how they express it, one obvious one being the relative importance individuals place on maintaining relationships with others, vs displaying intellectual dominance over others in debates.
Its pretty obvious which ones on the continuum tend to survive best in an anonymous internet forum and which type will be most attracted to that kind of communication medium in the first place.
, so I’m going to try for wise instead!